Naming the Bones

by Louise Welsh

  Somewhere in the distance a road drill rumbled, but otherwise it was quiet. He went barefoot into the hallway and opened the front door, screening his half-nakedness behind it. He’d neglected to lock up the night before, but no keys trembled in the keyhole. Murray shut it gently. The rush of air caught on the hairs on his legs and he realised he was cold. There was a sudden clatter of footsteps in the stairwell outside. He felt ridiculously vulnerable standing there in only his boxers. Murray turned towards the bathroom, but the snap of the letterbox brought him back into the hallway and the letters sprawled on the mat.

  He took his dressing gown from the hook on the back of the bathroom door and went into the kitchen. There was no mineral water in the fridge so he filled a mug with water from the tap, drank it quickly and then poured himself a second. Christ, was this what it was like to be an alcoholic? If Archie had felt this way every morning then it was no wonder his published work consisted of a single collection.

  Murray didn’t want to think about the night before; the row with Rab, the phone call to Rachel, Rab and Rachel. The romance had been a knot in Murray’s stomach since it started, but now that it was over – more than over; now that it was ruined – the knot was replaced by a leaden deadness. He realised he’d been sustained by the thought that Rachel – Rachel, to whom he’d have addressed poems if only he could write – Rachel had chosen him. His knuckles tingled where he wished he’d slammed them into Rab’s face.

  It wasn’t Rab’s fault. He should send him an email, apologise.

  It changed everything; the knowledge that Rachel had slept with him too; Rab’s mouth kissing where he had kissed, his hands on her body. The thought disgusted him, even though he’d supposed she still slept with Fergus.

  Fergus.

  The phone call came back to him, the memory of the professor’s voice slick with anger. He groaned out loud. His sabbatical stretched ahead, twelve months for his head of department to nurse his wrath and engineer Murray’s successor.

  He felt like going back to bed, pulling the sheets over his head and letting temporary death overwhelm the after-drink urge to kill himself. Instead he sat on the couch cradling the cup of water in his hands. A double-decker bus rumbled along the road outside. Murray watched the small ripples disturbing the surface of his drink.

  Had there been a moment, a flash of mental clarity in the midst of the storm, when Archie had known he was going to die? He would have been wet already, soaked through by the rain and toppling waves, but the shock of water when the boat upturned must have taken the breath from him. How many times had he gone under before the final descent? How long had it taken? The sea sucking him down then spewing him back to the surface, the frantic struggle to stay afloat, the desperate grab for some purchase met by froth and foam. Or had he been knocked unconscious before he even hit the water? It was possible. The night had been wild, Archie sailing solo. Maybe he had fallen and hit his head against the side or been attacked by the boom. Archie had been careless with his life, sailing into the storm. Perhaps he’d been a careless sailor too. His body had never been found. It left no clues for the coroner. There was no convenient sheaf of newly forged poems slid safe in a waterproof envelope in his jeans pocket, no clues for the biographer either.

  Murray wandered through to the kitchen and looked down onto the backcourt. An old man in carpet slippers was scavenging through the bins. He watched him for a while then went into the hallway, picked up the phone and dialled the police. The phone rang for a long time, and then a deep voice said, ‘Sandyford police station.’

  ‘Hello, there’s an old man out the back of my building going through the rubbish. He’s in his slippers and I’m worried he’s got dementia or something.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘I’m not dressed yet.’

  The voice at the other end of the phone was weary.

  ‘Do you think he’s looking for receipts or anything?’

  ‘Receipts?’

  It was like a foreign word. Murray couldn’t think what it had to do with the conversation.

  ‘Identity fraud.’

  It was in his mind to say that the old man would be welcome to his identity, but he answered, ‘No, I don’t think he’s doing any harm. I just thought he might be confused.’

  ‘Okay,’ the policeman sighed again. ‘Give me your name and address and we’ll send someone round when we can.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  The voice contained the full quota of contempt that an early-rising man in uniform could hold for a civilian who had only now crawled out of bed.

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir.’

  Murray gave his details, hung up and went back to the window. The old man was gone. He stood there for a moment debating whether to call the police again or get dressed and hunt for him amongst the backcourts. In the end he did neither, simply clicked the kettle on and lifted his mail from the table.

  A bill from the factors, a leaflet from the local supermarket outlining their offers in colours bright enough to sicken the famished, a bank statement that would show he earned more than his needs, a plain white envelope and a letter stamped with the logo of Christie’s agents. He hesitated between the final two, and then tore at the seal of the agent’s letter.

  Dear Dr Watson

  Ms Graves has asked me to advise you that she has given your request serious consideration, but has regretfully decided to decline. Ms Graves has strong views on the privacy of artists, and while she wishes you every success in your critical analysis of Archie Lunan’s poetry, she does not see what a discussion of their time together would achieve. She now considers this correspondence closed and has asked me to bring to your attention the government’s recent anti-stalking legislation.

  Yours sincerely

  Foster James

  Niles, James and Worthing

  Murray swore and crumpled the letter into a ball.

  The airwaves were full of people talking. Child-murderers and drugs casualties, people who had once sat next to someone famous on the bus, even the dead were in on the act, revealing scandals from beyond the grave. Everywhere people were blogging, Twittering and confessing; TV shows ran late into the night detailing private lives that would have been better kept private; but Archie’s old love would consider a second approach grounds for prosecution.

  He smoothed the letter out and re-read it. The trick would be to bump into Christie casually, at a poetry reading perhaps. Somewhere with wine and easy company where he could lay on the charm, get her talking about old times before he admitted that yes, it was he who was writing Archie’s biography.

  Some chance.

  He smoothed the paper again, knowing it had to become part of his file. Did it tell him anything beyond what was said?

  Murray whispered. ‘You never left, never got any distance. That’s why you care so much.’

  He slit open the second envelope with his thumb, wondering what the penalties for stalking were and if stalkers were still allowed to teach. The green paper inside had been carefully folded in half. The type suggested that the sender had only recently come into possession of a word processor. Fonts battled for prominence, but boldest of all was the heading: God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Service times were detailed beneath.

  Murray crumpled the page and balled it into the recycling bag, trying to smile at the thought that – Rachel aside – it was the best offer he’d had in a while.

  Chapter Eight

  MURRAY SEEMED TO have been waiting a long time. He decided to count to a hundred then ring the doorbell again. He’d reached eighty-five when a shadow appeared, advancing slowly towards him beyond the thickened safety glass.

  ‘Aye, aye, just a minute.’

  Professor James’s voice was cracked with age and sharp with irritation. Murray thought of Macbeth’s porter, provoked by the knock at the castle door, comic in his anger, the m
oment of calm before the discovery of horror.

  James fumbled with a set of keys and his sigh was audible through the locked door, but it was only when the professor pushed it wide that Murray realised how badly he’d aged. It was almost twenty years since they’d met, but somehow he’d still expected to see the stern-faced lecturer who had approached the lectern like a United Free Church of Scotland minister about to deliver a sermon to a congregation set on damnation. Pipe-smoking, bespectacled and bad-tempered, his stocky body packed into an old tweed jacket, James had been everything that Murray, fresh from a comprehensive school staffed by corduroy-clad progressives, had desired in a university professor.

  James shook his hand. ‘Come away through.’

  The professor had never been handsome, but he’d been a vigorous presence, with the barrel chest and bullet head of a pugilist. Old age had shrunk his body and bent his spine, rendering his face oversized and jutting. The edge of his skull was decorated with a patina of freckles and grave spots. The effect was grotesque, an ancient, nodding toddler with an eager grin.

  ‘This is a rare treat. Two names from the past in one day.’

  Murray followed James down a small hallway decorated with photographs of the professor’s children and grandchildren. The glass front door had presumably been designed to let in light, but perhaps the house faced the wrong way, or maybe the day was too dull to extract any brightness from, because the hall was dark, the smiles in the pictures cast in shadows.

  ‘Two names?’

  ‘You and Lunan, outstanding students the pair of you.’

  It was strange, hearing himself coupled with the poet.

  ‘My student years certainly feel a long time past.’

  ‘You’ll be part of a million pasts by the time you’re finished. Teaching confers its own brand of celebrity. You get hailed by folk you’ve no memory of. My tip is allow them do the talking and don’t let on you’ve not got a clue who they are.’ James led Murray into a burgled-looking sitting room. He lowered himself gently into a high-backed armchair and nodded towards a chintz couch. ‘Shift those papers and make yourself comfortable. As you can see, I’ve reverted to a bachelor state.’

  Murray lifted a pile of handwritten notes and placed them on top of a stack of library books.

  ‘Ah, maybe not there. Helen’s coming round later to return those for me and if they’re hidden she’ll miss them.’

  James scanned the room looking for a suitable berth amongst the books and documents crowding the room. ‘Why not put them …’ He hesitated while Murray hovered uncertainly, papers in hand. ‘Why not put them here?’ He nodded to the floor in front of him. ‘That way if I forget about them they’ll trip me up and the problem will be redundant.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It would be a suitable ending for an aged academic, tumbled by words.’

  Traces of James’s dead wife clung to the house. Professor James would surely never have chosen the floral curtains that screened the small window in the hall, nor the sets of figurines gazing unadored from behind the dull glass of the china cabinet, but the tone of the place had shifted from a respectable family home with a feminine bent to an old bachelor’s bed-sit.

  The kettle was in the sitting room, where it could be easily reached. An open packet of sugar, a cardboard box spilling tea bags and a carton of suspect milk stood next to it. The coffee table was stacked with books, each of the piles tiled together with the precision of a Roman mosaic. A smaller occasional table at James’s side held a glass of water, a selection of medication and yet more books. Murray noted a copy of Lunan’s Moontide on top of the pile, within easy reach of James’s right hand.

  They parleyed a little about the department, but Murray sensed that the older man’s questions were merely form. The part of himself he had given to the university now occupied the books and papers that scattered the room. Murray’s presence was a brief distraction, a meeting on the shore before the tide of words dragged him back.

  Murray reached into his rucksack, placed his tape recorder on top of one of the piles between them and pressed Record. James cleared his throat and his voice slowed to lecture-theatre pace.

  ‘I’ve only ever kept an appointments diary, so I’m afraid you won’t get any great insights from me, but I did look up the year in question and found a reference to a meeting I had with Lunan immediately after he was told his presence on our undergraduate course would no longer be required.’ James produced a daily diary stamped 1970, opened it at a bookmarked page and passed it to Murray. It had been a hectic week. James’s lectures were marked clearly in black ink, but the rest of the page was scattered with scrawls in several different colours, black battling blue and red, pencilled scribbles and underlinings. ‘He was a Tuesday appointment, afternoon of course. I don’t think Archibald Lunan was ever a friend of early mornings.’

  Murray saw AL 2.30 jotted in the margin of a busy day. He asked, ‘How did Lunan react to being sent down?’

  ‘Sent down?’ The tone was mild. ‘I wasn’t aware we were in Oxford or Cambridge.’

  ‘No.’ Murray leaned back in his chair wondering how, for all his preparations, he could have forgotten the pedantry that lay behind James’s smile. ‘Was he upset?’

  ‘He may have been. But as far as I can recall, he took it like a man.’

  ‘Standard procedure would have been to send Lunan a letter. Why did you feel the need to inform him personally?’

  ‘I asked myself exactly the same thing when I saw the appointment in my diary.’

  James’s manner shifted and Murray realised he’d hit on a question that interested the old man. He remembered this pattern from his undergraduate tutorials, the professor’s initial impatience set aside as he got into the meat of the matter, as if the verbal barbs were self-defence against boredom.

  ‘Let’s just say, whatever it was, I wouldn’t have trusted Lunan to anyone else in the department at that time. Even I could see we were a bunch of stuffed shirts.’ James moved slightly against his cushions as if trying to settle his bones. ‘Perhaps it says something about my own prejudices, but Archie looked belligerent. Long hair, cowboy moustache, scruffy clothes … there’s a particular leather coat that sticks in the memory.’ James gave a scholarly chuckle. ‘Ten years later teachers and lecturers had adopted the same look, with the exception of a few diehards like myself, the tweed jacket and suede shoes brigade. But back then, in Scotland at any rate, that kind of image still had counterculture connotations. So couple it with Lunan’s poor attendance … I was possibly worried he might get the stuffing knocked out of him. Despite his posturing, Lunan always struck me as delicate.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He was sensitive, not a prerequisite for poets as you no doubt know. He looked the part, as I said, the leather coat, the ready fists, the all-too-frequently cut lip and black eye, but he wasn’t as robust as he made out.’

  Murray asked, ‘How do you mean?’

  James paused and looked at the ceiling as if searching for an explanation in its shadowed corners.

  ‘In those days I had a little group who used to meet once a month and discuss their own verse.’ James was being modest. His ‘little group’ had fostered a school of writers whose reputation had spread far beyond the literary circles of their city. Some of its members had later helped define their nation to the world. ‘The first poem Lunan presented was plagiarised. It was badly written enough to be the work of an undergraduate so there’s a good possibility I wouldn’t have rumbled him, if I hadn’t had a poem published in the same back issue of the journal he’d lifted it from.’ James shook his head in wonder. ‘Amazing.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘My first instinct was to ask him about it in front of the group, but I resisted. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was already aware of Archie’s vulnerability. I simply took him aside and told him I knew. I think I expected that would be the last we saw of him, but for all he was weak, Archie was tough too. He ca
me to the following meeting, this time with his own work. I must have been curious because I agreed to read it.’ James grimaced. ‘The poems he gave me were good. Not perfect, but original.’

  Murray nodded towards Lunan’s book, perched on top of the pile at the professor’s elbow.

  ‘Did any of the poems he showed you appear in Moontide?’

  ‘One of them. “Preparation for a Wake”. It was revised and tightened up by the time the collection was published, of course, but the concept was there at the start: the raising of the dead man, the play on words between a wake and awake, the horror his drinking companions feel when their dead mate sits up ready to join in the merrymaking. The lyricism of the language wasn’t as successful as it was in the published version, but it was still remarkable.’

  ‘What did the rest of the group make of it?’

  ‘I don’t recall any particular debate. You have to remember it was a long time ago, and we were privileged to be at the birth of many remarkable pieces.’

  James looked Murray in the eye. It was like a door slamming.

  ‘How did Archie get on with the group in general?’

  ‘Okay, as far as I remember. But as I said, it was a long time ago.’

  Another door shut.

  James gave the kind of smile favoured by American presidents on the stocks, but the professor’s teeth were yellowed, his gums pink and receding.

  ‘What about your own response to his work?

  ‘My own response?’

  The professor made the question sound preposterous.

  Murray smiled apologetically.

  ‘What was your initial reaction when you eventually got to see his writing?’

  It was a sunny day outside, but the sitting room windows had taken on the smoky taint that glass acquires after a year or two’s neglect and the pair were stuck in murk and shadow. The dust that coated the air was formed from James and James’s wife, decayed and merged. Murray wanted to brush them from himself, but instead he smiled and waited.